Wednesday, June 27, 2007

integrating LinuxCoe's automatic installation features into openQRM

It is a really cool (open-source) tool from HP for creating iso-images which then fully automatically install your favourite linux distribution on a system. Just burn the iso, put the CD in a computer, switch it on and it automatically installs itself without any further interaction needed. It supports a bunch of different distributions like CentOS, Debian, Fedora, openSuse, RHEL, Scientific Linux, SLES, Ubuntu etc. and their specific auto-installation types like kickstart, autoyast and preseed. A full configured linux-installation iso-image can be created with just a few mouse clicks. It even supports to save the pre-configured installations in profiles.I like it, it is really handy to use :)

One of the base concepts of the openQRM project is "imaging" of servers and deployment through the network. Still to create "server images" for rapid deployment via openQRM one has to "install" a server first. --> this step is still missing in openQRM

;) but it will come soon as a new "linuxcoe-plugin".

This plugin will enable the administrator to simply create a new linux installation profile from the above mentioned linux-distributions and select one or more systems in openQRM to automatically install them.The idea is to use the auto-install configuration files, the kernel and the initrd which are created by LinuxCoe to network-boot the servers into the fully automatic installation instead of booting them via a CD burnt from the iso-image.

Please find a few screenshots of the current development status of the LinuxCoe plugin for openQRM as taster below ;)

Creating an installation profile with LinuxCoe :

Configuring the installation-preferences (1) :

Configuring the installation-preferences (2) :

Selecting the packages for the automatic installation :

Setting the disk partitioning :

Review the disk partitioning setup :

Final detailed configuration of e.g. root and user account :

Installation iso-image created :

Managing the unpacked installation profiles from the previous created iso-images :